Sounds: Boat Trip

Sounds: Boat Trip — Wassily Kandinsky. 1911.

Medium: color woodcut. Dimensions: Sheet: 28 x 27.9 cm (11 x 11 in.); Image: 22 x 22.1 cm (8 11/16 x 8 11/16 in.).

Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

For Kandinsky, music functioned perfectly as an abstract art: it does not require words or narrative to elicit a direct and powerful emotional response from the listener. For him, representational art--art that focused on depicting recognizable subjects such as figures, landscapes, still lifes-squandered the possibility of speaking directly to the viewer’s soul. Kandinsky wanted visual art to achieve the emotional impact of music through abstraction rather than representation. He believed that the only way for art to elicit an emotional response was to speak to the unconscious, bypassing logic and other forms of reasoning.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.